This is looking pretty sweet dude. The griffin really turned out great. And as for the practicality of the weapon...http://www.iconsoffright.com/images/Meat_Train_4.jpg ...seems to work for him.
Bwah? It's pretty standard practice to lead with a demo... for exactly the reason you mention at the end there. Just played the demo thanks to this thread and loved it. Will definitely buy.
if you have an IK rig setup already i'd just go straight to the animations and see if it makes for feasible workflow. I mean if you have a handful of animations to do that maybe amounts to like <50 hours of work, not sure that spending another 20 hours or more to make some additional rig features that might improve…